i'm not sure how this works but doesn't tmobile have hot spots all over the place (i'm not sure if they cost the business any thing or not). why can't carriers use this as a new part of business. either selling branded hot spots to business or adopting something like wimax and offering it as an alternative to data plans that are somewhat inferior.

if you read repotrs on the fcc's websire wit tmobil an cingular buying frequency airspace you wi notice that tmo has bought up almos all of the airspace for the 1900mhz frequency this is the frequency ther wifie an hotspot run off of the also have a littl bit of th 859 mhz band for i geuss experimenting with HSDPA.
the situation is reversed on thes frquncies with att/cingular/whatever they call themselves now.

if you read repotrs on the fcc's websire wit tmobil an cingular buying frequency airspace you wi notice that tmo has bought up almos all of the airspace for the 1900mhz frequency this is the frequency ther wifie an hotspot run off of the also have a littl bit of th 859 mhz band for i geuss experimenting with HSDPA.
the situation is reversed on thes frquncies with att/cingular/whatever they call themselves now.

Umm, no - their WiFi routers run in good ol' ISM 2400 just like any other Linksys or DLink AP you can buy. 850 and 1900 are the two North American GSM bands - they are also UMTS bands, as is 1700, which TMo just bought up.

What the hotspots offer is GAN (or in this case UMA), which allows your AP to "look" like another cell tower to TMo's network, so when you switch from your GSM radio to your 802.11 radio, the network just sees you hopping stations, the same as if you were driving down the freeway.

All that other good stuff that comes with an 802.11 radio? web browsing in true HTML, faster data access, browsing your local network for files etc... TMo doesn't want you doing that either. They want you to do that over *their* network so they can charge you for copying your own data.

It's simple: the carriers by and large do not want WiFi in their devices because it serves as competition to their own services. Because carriers in the US are a de facto oligopoly, they pretty much have control over which features make it to the market.

The market clearly wants smart phones with WiFi. It's not hard to do. Look, I can get built-in WiFi in any new $500 laptop; why can't I get WiFi in every new $500 smart phone?

T-Mobile will allow more WiFi enabled devices through than the other carriers because they have their hotspots, and thus have a financial benefit in putting these devices out there.

The carriers by virtue of their power in the market stifle innovation and feature development in the equipment, if these features do not benefit them.